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The new features in IBM® Cognos® 8.4 BI provide benefits to business managers and analysts, business modelers, report authors, and system administrators. All studios include a new feature for suppressing rows and columns that contain zero values, missing values, or overflow values. A new lineage feature in Report Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio, and the report viewer, allows you to view life cycle information on each piece of data.

Business Managers and Analysts

In Query Studio, the addition of more user preferences and the enhancement of filtering and sorting options make it quicker for Business Analysts to set up and run reports. Also, because modelers can set default filters in a Framework Manager model, it is easier for users to set up and run reports.

Analysis Studio includes a new feature that makes it easier to apply suppression across multiple items. From within Analysis Studio, you can also display the date on which a cube was last updated.

Business Modelers

Business modelers using Transformer can now use fact data from SAP BW OLAP data sources. This means they can create Transformer models based on existing dimensional models. Transformer also supports Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets as data sources.

Report Authors

Report authors now have more drill-through capabilities, including the ability to pass filters from the source report to the target report. They can also conditionally style crosstab cells based on values in other cells.

More types of charts and more graphics are included with Report Studio for use in reports and dashboards.

Report Consumers

You can add additional information to a report by using comments. This information can include questions or explanations. Comments may include the original commentator’s ID and the time the comments were added.

System Administrators

Support for IBM Cognos 8 is extended to include more operating systems, data sources, Web servers, application servers, portals, and browsers. For more information see Appendix A: Supported Environments.

It is now easier for Administrators to organize packages and control which packages specific users can see in the portal.